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About As She Climbed Across the Table

Anna Karenina left her husband for a dashing officer. Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has her boyfriend for nothing … nothing at all. Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice’s spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of Gun, with Occasional Music. Alice Coombs is a particle physicist, and she and her colleagues have created a void, a hole in the universe, that they have taken to calling Lack. But Lack is a nullity with taste—tastes; it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws—because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written.

About As She Climbed Across the Table

Anna Karenina left her husband for a dashing officer. Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has her boyfriend for nothing … nothing at all. Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice’s spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of Gun, with Occasional Music. Alice Coombs is a particle physicist, and she and her colleagues have created a void, a hole in the universe, that they have taken to calling Lack. But Lack is a nullity with taste—tastes; it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws—because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written.

BONUS MATERIAL: This edition includes an excerpt from Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens.

About As She Climbed Across the Table

Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.

The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a book of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.

Passion, humor, yearning and knowledge, blended together in a suspenseful love story that could be characterized as "American Magical Realism."

Praise

“Exceptionally clever. . . . A book of compelling ideas, of intellectual conflict, of human frailty and desire. And it’s funny.”—Dallas Morning News

“Jonathan Lethem has succeeded in delivering a wonderland on the side of the looking glass,” —San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Lethem is opening blue sky for American fiction. . . . He is rapidly evolving into his own previously uncataloged species.” —Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Wickedly funny.” —Columbus DIspatch

“An oddball tour de force.” —Entertainment Weekly

About Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels, including most recently Dissident Gardens. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s,… More about Jonathan Lethem

About Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels, including most recently Dissident Gardens. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s,… More about Jonathan Lethem

About Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the author of nine novels, including most recently Dissident Gardens. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper’s,… More about Jonathan Lethem